The Struggle of Being #2 by Hope

The Struggle of Being #2 by Hope - April 2019 Scholarship Essay

To give context to my title, I am academically ranked second in my class of 325 people. The perpetual competition for intellectual superiority in my school represents my four year long academically challenging situation. It has been a constant struggle for me to maintain good grades and excell among my peers. However, the most challenging part was maintaining motivation, especially in the second semester of my senior year of high school. There are times when I question what I do it all for. My parents don’t really encourage me; They would be happy with whatever grades I receive. My friends are helpful because good grades seems to be a commonplace, connecting quality among us, but just like my parents, GPA is relatively unimportant. So, where does my motivation for academically excelling to second rank come from?
Surprisingly, money was the main catalyst for my academic excellence. I discovered in about middle school that my parents would be unable to finance my higher education, so I started looking for financial substitutes to subsidize my education. I wasn’t particularly athletically talented; in fact, I sucked at all sports, so an athletic scholarship was out of the question. My parents weren’t poor enough for me to receive exceptional financial aid from the government. So, the only option left for me was academic merit scholarships and since I was already a straight A student in 8th grade, I decided it wasn’t completely unrealistic for me. Therefore, I started my freshman year on a roll and I completed my freshman classes relatively easily with a 4.0 GPA at the end of the year. The addition of my first AP classes in my sophomore year was slightly more difficult, but constant studying and help from teachers and friends allowed me to finish the year with only one A- in Geometry. (I HATE GEOMETRY!) Junior year was the hardest by a long slide: more AP classes and the ACT made school exponentially more challenging, but again thanks to my persistent study habits, I prevailed. First semester senior year was also hard for me because I found AP Literature particularly difficult. However, I recently discovered that my hard work paid off! I was informed at the end of last semester that I will be the recipient of a small scholarship my school offers to the top three people in the class. Hopefully, that’s just the tip of the iceberg for me and more scholarships are headed my direction. I do believe I have worked hard enough throughout my entire high school career to be rewarded, but I suppose that’s up for you to decide now.
Thank you,
Hope